SCENES AMONG THE POOR.
EFFECTS OF DRUNKENNESS. (FROM OUR JOURNAL.)
"It sometimes seems in our Industrial Schools as if each wretched,
blear-eyed, half-starved, filthy little girl was a living monument of
the curses of Intemperance. The rags, the disease, the ignorance, the
sunny looks darkened, the old faces on young shoulders, are not
necessarily the pitiable effects of overwhelming circumstances. The
young creatures are not always cursed by poverty principally, but by the
ungoverned appetites, bad habits and vices of their parents. On 'Dutch
Hill' one can hardly enter a shanty where is a sober family. The women
all drink; the men work, and then carouse. The hard earnings go off in
alcohol. No savings are laid up for the winter. The children are ragged
and unprotected, and, but for the Industrial School, uneducated. It is
sometimes the saddest sight to see a neat little shanty grow day by day
more filthy; the furniture sold, the windows broken, the children
looking more thin and hungry, the parents falling out of honest
work--all the slow effects of ungoverned passion for liquor.
"I entered, yesterday, a little hut on the 'Hill,' where a middle-aged
woman lived, whom I knew. She was sitting near the door, weeping
violently. I asked her the reason, and, after a little time, she told
me. Her eldest daughter, a girl of twenty, had just been in drunk, and
had struck her over the eye; and when her mother was looking at her
bruise in the glass, she had dashed her fist through the glass.
'"There was no safety there, the mother said, when she came in. If they
were away she would burst open the doors and break the furniture, and
cut her sewing-work to pieces. 'She is a devil, sir, when she's in
liquor!' _Three times_ the mother had had her arrested and sent to
Blackwell's Island; 'but somehow, sir, she's always worse when she comes
out, and I niver heard her use bad words till she'd been there.
"'Now, God knows where she lives--they say it's in a bad house; and it's
I who am afraid she's gittin' Tommy, her broder, into the same way, for
he doesn't come home now. O God! _I might as well be in hell!_' Nothing
can convey the tone of despair with which that was said. She told me how
the girl had been such a bright little one. 'She was so pretty, sir; and
maybe we flattered her, and made too much of her. And her father, he
thought she ought to learn the dressmakin' trade, but she felt somehow
above it, and she went to be a book-folder downtown. And one day we
missed her till late o' night; and thin the next night it was later, and
at last her father--bless his poor soul!--he said she shouldn't be out
so, and whipt her. And thin she niver came back for three nights, and we
thought, maybe, she's at her work, and has to stay late; and we niver
suspected how it was, when, suddenly, Mrs. Moore came and said as how
Maggy said she was at Mrs. Rooney's--the ould divil--and my husband
wouldn't belave it at all; but I wint and bust open the door wid a
stone, and found _her_--my own child--there wid a lot of men and women;
and I swore at 'em, and the M. P.'s they come and cleared 'em all out,
and there was the last of her. She's niver been an honest woman since,
when she's in liquor. It broke her father's heart. He died the next
Saturday; people said it was some sort of dysentry, but I know it was
this. God help me! And, now, sir (almost fiercely), can't you get me out
of this? All I want is, to sell my shanty, and wid my two little ones,
git away from _her._ I don't care how far!'
"The mother fleeing her daughter. The pretty child becomes a drunken
outcast! So ends many a sad history in our city."
THE DYING SEWING-WOMAN.
"In East Thirty-fourth Street, in a tenement-house, a poor sewing-woman
has lived for the last two years. She had formerly been in very good
circumstances, and her husband, a respectable mechanic, earned a support
for her and her children, until at length he fell into intemperate
drinking. With the appetite for liquor on him, everything that he made
was spent, and he himself was gradually becoming worse and worse. The
poor wife was forced to the hardest work to keep her children and
herself alive. Last winter, in a moment of desperation, the husband put
his name down for a three-years' whaling voyage, and was taken off to
sea, leaving the woman with an old father and three children to care
for. Many a night, the old man says, has the poor creature walked up
from the lower part of the city (some three or four miles) with four
dozen shirts on her back, through snow and wet, and then, without fire
or food, in her wet clothes, has worked till the dawn of day for the
poor little ones dependent on her. He has seen _the blood_ come from her
mouth and nose after some of these efforts. Still more bitter than all
this, was the sense of desertion by her husband. But it was all in vain.
The children for whom she had slaved, and whom she loved more than her
own life, were attacked with scarlet fever, and two of them died in the
mother's arms. One only, a sweet little girl, was left. With them went
the spring of hope and courage which had sustained the hard-working
mother. Her father says she never shed a tear, but she lost heart; and,
though never doubting of the goodness of her Great Father, she had not
the spirit for the remaining work of life. Her exposures and hard labor
had brought on a cough, and finally a disease of the lungs. She was at
last unable to work, and could only lie upon her bed and depend on the
chance charities of strangers.
"The teacher of our Fortieth-street School, who, in a way unseen and
unknown to the world, is a minister of mercy and goodness to all that
quarter of the city, first discovered her, and has managed, with a
little aid here and there, to lighten her dying hours.
"I was called in the other day and held a long conversation with her.
She has no more fears or anxieties; she is not even troubled about her
little one. God will care for her. 'Once,' she said, 'I felt it so hard
to lose the children, but now I am glad they are gone! They will be much
better where they are than here. I have put everything away now,' she
added, with an expression of sublime faith and hope on a face whose worn
features the hectic flush made almost beautiful again. 'I trust all to
my Redeemer. Through him alone I hope. He will forgive me and receive
me.' She spoke of her many trials and sorrows--they were all over, and
she was glad she was soon to be at rest.
"We asked about her food. She said she could not relish many things, and
she often thought if she could only get some of the good old plain
things she had in Ireland at her brother's farm she should feel so much
better.
"I told her we would get her some good genuine oat-meal cake from an
Irish friend. Her face lighted up at once, and she seemed cheered by the
promise.
"'Oh, sir! I have thought so much of my mother in this sickness, and
those happy, happy days. I was such a happy girl! How little she thought
I would come to this! We lived in the North, you know, and had
everything very comfortable, as all the Protestant Irish do. But it's
all gone, gone,' she said, dreamily, 'and I wouldn't have it back again,
for God is the best friend--He knows,
"'Oh, how glad I am to die!
His rod and His staff they comfort me.'
"The words were simple, but the whole was touching beyond description,
forcing tears whether one would or not.
"We were glad to find that her clergyman, the Missionary of the Calvary
Church, had administered the sacraments to her that day. May she soon be
where the sting of poverty, the rubs and blows of hard circumstances,
the loneliness of desertion, the anxiety and care, and hopelessness, and
disappointment which have followed her unhappy path, shall cease
forever, and the unfortunate one shall enter on her new and blissful
life of peace and abiding love!"
DISCOURAGEMENT.
"I was lately visiting a poor woman, who had seen better circumstances,
the wife of a worker in an iron-foundry. The room was bare but clean,
and the woman was neatly dressed, though her face looked thin and worn,
and her eyes had an unusual expression of settled, sad discouragement. A
little girl of ten or eleven sat near her tending a baby, with the same
large sad blue eyes, as if the expression of the mother had come to
receive a permanent reflection in the child's face. Her husband had been
sick for several months, which put them all behind, though now he was
getting work enough.
"'You know how it is, sir,' she said, 'with working people: if a man
falls out of work for a day, the family feels it for a week after. We
can hardly make the two ends meet when he's well, and the moment he is
sick it comes hard upon us. Many's the morning he's gone down to the
foundry without his breakfast, and I've had to send out the little Maggy
there, to the neighbors, for bits of bread, and then she's taken it down
to him.'
"'She is a beggar, then?'
"'Yes, sir, and sorrow of it. We never thought we could come to that. My
mother brought me up most dacently, and my husband, he's a very good
scholard, and could be a clark or anything, but we can't help it! We
must have bread. I would be willing to do anything, wash, scrub, or do
plain sewing; and I keep trying, but I never find anything. There seems
no help for us; and I sometimes feel clean gone and down-hearted: and
I'm troubled at other things, too."
"'What other things?'
"'At my sin, ye see.'
"'What do you mean?'
"'Well, sir, if I could only have peace of mind! But I work on from
Monday morn to Saturday night, and I never hear or see anything good;
and when Sunday comes, I can't go out; I haven't any bonnet for my head,
or any dress fit for a dacent church. I just walk the floor, and I don't
dare to think of ever meeting God."
"'Are you a Catholic?'
"'Yes, sir; I was brought up one, and so was my husband, but now it's
little we know, as they say, of mass, meeting, or church; we ain't
neither Catholics or Protestants; I might as well be a haythen. We
haven't any books, nor a prayer-book, or anything. I know it, sir, we
ought to pray," she continued, "but I kneel down sometimes, and I get up
and say to my husband, 'It's no use my praying, I am too much
distracted.' If I could only get some good to my soul, for I think of
dying often, and I see I should not be at all ready. _Life is a burden
to me._' I spoke of the hopes and consolations which can come to poor as
well as rich, and of her children. 'Yes, sir; no one can tell the
patience of the Lord. How much He has borne from me! Oh, if I could only
have peace of mind, and see those children getting on well, I should be
glad to die. That little girl cries every time we send her out to beg,
and she's learning nothing good. But I am afraid nothing will ever come
lucky to us; and oh, sir, if you could have seen how we started in
Ireland, and what a home my mother had; she was a very different woman
from what I am.'
"We spoke of her attending the mission meeting in Fortieth Street, and
reading a Testament given by us. She seemed glad to do both.
"'Oh, sir, if I could only feel that friendship with God you spoke of, I
shouldn't care; I could bear anything; but to work as we are doing, and
to have such trouble, and see the poor wee thing grow thinner and
poorer, and my man almost down broken, and then to get no nearer--no, we
keep getting farther from the Lord! Oh, if I was only ready to die! I
haven't nothing in this world.'
"Let us hope that the peace-giving words of Christ, the love of the
Redeemer, may at length plant in that poor, weary discouraged soul the
seeds of hope and immortal faith, even as they have done in so many
thousands weary and heavy-laden!"
THE SWILL-GATHERER'S CHILD.
"Most of those familiar with the East River Industrial School will
remember a poor widow--a swill-gatherer--who lived in the notorious
village of shanties near Forty-second Street, known as 'Dutch Hill.' She
owned a small shanty, which had been put up on some rich man's lot as a
squatter's hut, and there, with her pigs and dogs and cat in the same
room, she made her home. From morning till evening she was trailing
about the streets, filling up her swill-cans, and at night she came back
to the little dirty den, and spent her evenings--we hardly know how. She
had one smart little girl who went to the Industrial School. As the
child came back day by day, improving in appearance, singing her sweet
songs, and with new ideas of how ladies looked and lived, the mother
began to grow ashamed of her nasty home. And I remember entering one
day, and finding, to my surprise, pigs and rubbish cleared out, the
walls well scrubbed, and an old carpet on the floor, and the mother
sitting in state on a chair! It was the quiet teachings of the school
coming forth in the houses of the poor.
"After a while the little girl began to get higher ideas of what she
might become, and went out with another girl to a place in the West. She
did well there, and was contented, but her mother was continually
anxious and unhappy about her, and finally, after some years, forced her
to return to the city. She was now a very neat, active young girl, far
above her mother's condition, and the change back to the pig-shanty and
Dutch Hill was anything but pleasant. The old woman hid away her best
clothes to prevent her going back, and seemed determined to make her a
swill-gatherer like herself. Gradually, as might be expected, we began
to hear bad stories about our old scholar. The people of the
neighborhood said, she drank and quarreled with her mother, and that she
was frequenting houses where low company met. Another of the worst Dutch
Hill girls--the daughter of a drunkard--was constantly with her. Soon we
heard that the other young girl had been sent to Blackwell's Island, and
that this one must be saved now, or she would be utterly lost. I went up
at once to the old woman's shanty, though with but the feeblest hopes of
doing anything, yet with many unuttered prayers. For who that knows the
career before the street-girl of the city can help breathing out his
soul in agony of prayer for her, when the time of choice comes?
"When I entered the shanty, the young girl was asleep on the bed, and
the mother sat on a box, crooning and weeping.
"'Och, and why did I iver tak ye from that swate place--ye that was
makin' an honest woman of yoursel'! Ach, God bless your honor! can ye
help her? She's a'most gone. Can't ye do somethin'?'
"'Well, how is she doing now?'
"'Och (in a whisper), your honor, she brought three bad fellers last
night, and she brake my own door in, and I tould 'em-says I, I'm an
honest woman, and I never had ony sich in my kin--and she was
drunk--yes, yer honor, she, my own darlint, strak me, and wanted to turn
me out--and now there she's been sleepin' all the mornin'. Ach, why did
I tak her out of her place!'
"Here the girl woke up, and sat up on the bed, covering her face in
shame. I said some few sober words to her, and then the mother threw
herself down on the floor, tears pouring down her cheeks.
"'Ach, darlint! my own swate darlint! will ye not list to the gintleman?
Sure an' ye wouldn't bring disgrace to yer ould mither and yer family!
We've had six generations of honest people, and niver wan like this!
Ach, to think of comin' to your ind on the Island, and be on the town!
For the love of the blessed Vargin, _do_ give them all up, and say ye
won't taste a drop--do, darlint!'
"The girl seemed obdurate; so I took up the sermon, and we both pleaded,
and pictured the shame and pain and wretched life and more wretched
death before her. There is no need of delicacy in such cases, and the
strongest old Bible Saxon words come home the deepest. At last, her
tears began to flow, and finally she gave her full assent to breaking
off from liquor and from her bad company (it should be remembered she
was only about sixteen); and she would show her repentance by going back
to the place where she was, if they would receive her. I hardly expected
she would do so; but in a day or two she was in the office, and started
for her old situation. Since that we have had a letter from her and her
mistress, and she seems to be getting on wonderfully well. May God
uphold her!
"The following is a letter we have received from her since:
"'B----, PENN., October 11.
"'MY DEAR MOTHER--I have the pleasure of writing a few lines to you, to
let you know that I am well. I got safe back to my place; kind friends
took me back again; I have got into the country, where there is plenty
of everything to live on. Dear mother, I would like very much to hear
from you. I hope you are all well; please write soon. I want you to show
this letter to Miss Spratt. [Now Mrs. Hurley.]
Good-by, dear mother.
M.
"'DEAR MISS SPRATT--As I was writing to my mother, I thought I would
like to write a few lines to you. Now that I am so far away, I feel a
grateful remembrance of your kindness, I am very sorry I did not have a
chance of going to see you before I left the city. Please tell Mr. Brace
I am much obliged to him for his kindness: tell him I got safe back to
Mr. M.'s, and have a very good home. Good-by, Miss Spratt'"
The East River Industrial School (at No. 206 East Fortieth Street)
still continues its humble but profound labors of love. Mrs. Hurley is
still there, the "Mend of the poor" for miles around, carrying sympathy,
advice, and assistance to thousands of unbefriended creatures, and
teaching faithfully all day in the School. Two gentlemen have especially
aided her in providing food and clothing for her little ones; and the
lady-volunteers still give liberally of their means and time. May the
School long shine as a light in one of the dark places of the city.